I will share with you, my recommendations I give to patients before I can schedule them for wisdom tooth disimpaction surgery. These recommendations work well for decades but I will also give you a secret weapon to tip the skills in your favour even more. 

But what can you do in the short run before your appointment to have wisdom teeth removed? 

Most dentists will prescribe antibiotics to kill those bacteria that you can’t reach to brush, floss and rinse away. This can be a great idea in the short term but not so wise in the long run. In case you have not read the headline after headline about the overuse of antibiotics being the cause of superbug infections, then let me catch you up. Superbugs are those bacteria that can survive even the strongest of antibiotics. These bugs can lead to pneumonia, urinary tract infections, kidney infections, bladder infections, or even blood infections. So are you sure you wanna play the antibiotics card everytime your body gets a little localized infection? I never take antibiotics unless I know my body’s immune system absolutely needs that extra help. Wisdom tooth infection is almost never life threatening. Because it is a local infection that the body almost always gets control over a week or two. Your surgeon can almost never get you in for extraction during that time frame. Here are the home remedies I always recommend:

  • Mildly brush the infected gums with a soft toothbrush to remove as much plaque or food debris as you can.
  • Floss properly well behind your second molar. Now that’s usually the tooth farthest back in your mouth that you can fully see.
  • Make a warm salt water solution that mimics the body’s fluid. You make that with half a teaspoon of salt dissolved in eight-ounce cup of very warm water. You can swish hard with this to try and break some of the plaque and food debris that might have escaped your brushing and flossing.
  • After rinsing continuously hold that warm water over the affected area until it cools down usually about 30 seconds or so. This can help reduce swelling up to tissues by a process called osmosis. Until a few years ago those recommendations helped all but the most extreme cases until I could get them in for surgery to remove the wisdom teeth to alter the plaque-trapping circumstance since then I have felt one more tool, the secret weapon, rinsing properly with electrolyzed oxidising water or EO water is that weapon. Because it’s special ability to kill every bacteria, virus and single cell organism with which it comes in contact for a reasonable period of time. 30 seconds for most bacteria and up to 2 minutes for bacilli serious, another food poisoning bacteria. The fact that your water kills all single cell life forms which have been known for decades but its acidic pH can cause damage to materials that are affected badly by strong acids. Your teeth qualify as a material damage by this acid if and only if you use it incorrectly.